Come join musicians and archivists Christina Crowder (New Haven, CT), Brian Miller (St. Paul, MN) and Danny Diamond (Minneapolis, MN/Ireland) for a presentation and question and answer session on using traditional music archives in your musical practice. While all three musicians play in different cultural traditions, all three have spent time digging into and helping share music from early recordings and manuscript collections. We’ll hear a little from each presenter about the archives they are working with, how they are using them as inspiration for the present, and how they approach the process of making sense of and diving into large archival collections of music. Bring your questions, as there will also be time for questions from the audience!

This event is free to attend; a suggested donation of $5-$10 is welcome. This event is co-presented by Folk Will Save Us, Celtic Junction’s McKiernan Library, and Center for Irish Music. This activity is supported in part by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

About Christina Crowder:

Christina has been performing and researching Jewish music for nearly thirty years, beginning in Budapest, Hungary in 1993, continuing with a Fulbright grant to Romania to document Jewish music in 1999, and since 2002 with an active research, teaching, and performing career in the US. She is the Executive Director of the Klezmer Institute. Her current work centers around Klezmer Institute’s Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project (KMDMP), The Lost Klezmer Music of the An-ski Expeditions at the Klezmer Institute, which includes 1,400 newly-available tunes collected in the early 1900s in current day Ukraine and Belarus, being digitized through Klezmer Institute’s 2020 international community-driven digital humanities project

Find out more here.

About Brian Miller:

Bemidji-native Brian Miller has performed Irish music as an accompanist and singer for over 25 years. He has earned considerable recognition for his work with the Irish-influenced music of Midwestern lumberjacks including several Minnesota State Arts Board grants and a 2014 Parsons Fund Award from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.  He has presented at the Inishowen Song Festival (Ireland) and the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society. After discovering mislabeled early recordings of Minnesota singers in the Library of Congress collection, he created a digital library and revived the songs with his duo The Lost Forty. As director of the McKiernan Library he has done several local history projects on Irish culture in the Twin Cities.

About Danny Diamond:

Danny Diamond is a fiddle player, recording engineer and digital humanities consultant from Ireland, currently based in Minneapolis, MN. He performs in a duo with multi-instrumentalist and singer Brian Miller, teaches with the Center for Irish Music in St Paul, Minnesota, and works as a consultant with local, regional and international Irish cultural heritage organizations. From 2021-24 Danny worked on an EU-funded computational research project University of Galway, Ireland, analysing melodic similarities between and within European folk music traditions. Previously, he spent a decade with the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) in Dublin, Ireland, where he managed the institution’s field and studio collecting programs and oversaw their historic non-commercial audio collections. Consultancy website: atlanticarts.net. Performance website: dannydiamond.ie.